Podcast

The Cloudcast

Last highlighted January 6, 2025 Source ↗ ← All highlights

General New Year’s Practices
- Start the new year by decluttering your workspace and setting goals.
- These general practices can help you stay organized and focused. Transcript: Brian Gracely So first thing I had on the list was general stuff. This is sort of the things that we do every year around New Year’s or around the end of December when you’ve got some downtime. And that’s just sort of the general stuff, right? Get rid of clutter, clean up your office a little bit, try and get rid of things that are getting in your way that are going to, you know, distract you and so forth. Set some goals, however you prefer to set goals. Some people love to set goals, others dread it beyond, you know, beyond belief. I’m one of those ones who really doesn’t love setting goals, at least really big goals. But anyways, you know, do some of those things. You know, again, they’re all sort of depends on the person. (Time 0:04:10)
Prioritizing Health
- Prioritize your health daily, especially in a stressful industry.
- Incorporate small exercises and movement into your routine, even during meetings. Transcript: Brian Gracely But as you get a little bit, you get a bit older, and you’ll see this as you get into your 30s, into your 40s, into your 50s and so forth, there’ll be plenty of days when you wake up and you’re Like, oh, that hurts. That didn’t hurt yesterday. Or why does, you know, why are things different than they were? So the first thing I got on my list is health, right? Make, and I can’t, you know, Aaron and I would both sort of probably put this in the top of our list is one, one a and two and so forth. Um, make it a daily priority, make your health a daily priority, whether it is what you’re eating. Um, because our, our industry as a whole is not, I don’t want to say it’s not the healthiest industry, but it is a, it is a high stress industry. It is a long hours industry. There is a lot of, of sitting, um, whether you are writing software or you are in meetings or you are traveling a lot. There’s a lot of stationary activities. It’s not an industry where we’re out doing things active in nature 40, 50, 60 hours a week. So figure out ways to make your health a daily priority, whether that is as simple as, you know, making sure that every day you do a certain amount of physical exercise, right? Get out and go for a walk, take the dog for a walk, go for a walk in between meetings around your building, your neighborhood, whatever that might be. It could be as simple as, you know, finding some five minute, 10 minute sort of stretching movement exercises you can do right at your desk in between meetings, or even you turn the camera Off, turn your microphone off and do some of those things during meetings. You know, it’s those little things that you can do every single day that are going to start to add up. You’re just, your body’s going to feel better. You’re going to have more energy. Again, you know, what you’re eating, I don’t want to make any sort of recommendations. I know people have all sorts of things that they perspective on, on what’s the right thing for them to eat. But, but in terms of sort of doing things that are physically active, and again, they can be as simple as just, you know, moving around, getting up out of your chair, every 30 minutes, 60 minutes, going for a walk for 15 minutes, blocking out time on your calendar, that you can just put, you know, busy work, and you go for a walk, and maybe you listen to a podcast or, you Know, you listen to a phone call or something. But I can’t stress enough. And that’s why I put it first in the list. Make your health a priority. Make any sort of daily routine a priority. (Time 0:05:02)
Understanding Budgets
- Understand your company’s budget and how it’s allocated.
- Look for partnership opportunities with well-funded groups to maximize resources. Transcript: Brian Gracely And these are kind of important things to be involved with, and they’re really kind of important at the early part of the year. So I’m going to highlight them in that context. So first and foremost, I mean, we mentioned this all the time on the show, while the technology is always interesting, being able to sort of follow the money, know where money comes from In our industry, whether those are budgets that your company puts together in order to be able to go do activities that you do have to do, or whether it’s revenues that come into your business Because of the goods and services that you sell, whatever those things might be. Understand sort of the money of your business, right? And the first and foremost thing that you probably most have to understand is budgets, right? What are the budgets going to look like that impact the work that you do? How are the budgets being allocated across your group? How are budgets being allocated and prioritized across your company? And that’s going to help you understand where does the business have priorities? Where is the business investing ahead of something? Where is the business putting money to sustain something? And you really just kind you want to, as best you can, ask questions about this, right? You don’t necessarily, you’re not necessarily going to always get answers of, you know, why did this group get more money than another group? You know, why exactly was this amount of money allocated to something? You’re always going to feel like there wasn’t enough money allocated towards whatever is important to you. And that’s just kind of the way budgets work. Budgets at the end of the day tend to become a gigantic negotiation. A lot of trade-offs are made, a lot of what’s good in the short term, what’s good in the long term, all those sort of things. But it’s really good to sort of just have an understanding of what they look like and most importantly, how they’re going to impact you. And the second thing, the reason I say that it’s to sort of understand it from a bigger picture perspective is if you look at the things that you’re working on and maybe you look at those And you go, if I don’t get these things done, if these things aren’t done to a certain quality, if they’re not done within a certain time, that’s going to impact me from a personal perspective, Right? You may not be able to make your goals. You may not be able to make your bonuses. You may not be able able to make your quotas. You may not be able to make whatever those things are that you get measured on that impact your ability to earn money, to take care of your family. You want to start thinking about, okay, if you don’t think the right budget was allocated towards you, where was the budget allocated and where are there opportunities for you to start Thinking about partnering with some of those groups, right? Are there opportunities that don’t seem maybe necessarily direct line of sight? You know, it works just for this thing that we’ve got to do, but are there sort of one plus one equals three opportunities? Are there opportunities to work with some groups that look like they may have bigger budgets that maybe if you both worked on something, maybe you can create some things out of that, That maybe they pay for more of it. Maybe you do a little more of the work because you’ve got some expertise in it. You want to start looking at those partnership opportunities. And again, this is why it’s important to ask the question just to understand how your company is allocating money, allocating budgets. (Time 0:07:45)
Budget Timing
- Budget finalization can take time, so inquire about directional estimates.
- Understanding the timing of budget allocation is crucial for project planning. Transcript: Brian Gracely Now, the second part of this, and this is always important, the first part of the year, budgeting is this very weird process, and it’s all dependent upon the company, and every company Does it a little bit differently. If you logically thought about it, you would think, okay, the leadership team must have thought about this and been thinking about this for the last number of months, or maybe even the Number of quarters. I’m sure they allocated all of this knowing what numbers they had coming down the road. We have to make this much revenue for the year. They probably have already worked out what the budgets are going to be by the first of the year, because if they haven’t worked that out, how is anybody going to get anything done? And that’s the logical, rational way of thinking about it. The reality is in most companies, again, whether you’re allocating out sales quotas or whether you’re allocating out budgets for teams or some combination of those sort of things, You typically don’t know exactly what those are sometimes until many months into the year. And it’s not unusual that budgets aren’t finalized until February, March. I’ve seen it into certain parts of the year. I’ve seen it get revised at the mid part of the year. So budgets are a very fluid thing, right? And it’s, it’s important to understand sort of where they are, how, how stabilized are they at any given point, say in January. And if you don’t know what the number is, at least, you know, sometimes you’ll ask your, your manager what the number is and they’ll go, well, it’s not finalized yet. And, and so that’s when you want to start asking them, okay, directionally, where do you think we’re going to be? Do you think we’re going to be about the same as last year? Do you think we’re going to get a little more than last year? Do you think we’re going to get a little less or a lot less? So you want to start asking some sort of directional questions about if it’s not finalized, where do you think it’s going to be? Because usually the managers will have a sense of where they think it’s going to be, because again, you’re in negotiation, you’re in sort of horse trading, you’re in swapping, and all Those sort of things. And so they have a sense of like, okay, this is where we started, right? And this is what we’re still sort of fighting for. This is what we’re still negotiating. But they’ll typically have a sense of like, it’ll be more than last year, it’ll be less than last year, it’ll be about the same as last year. (Time 0:10:42)
Skill Development in Cloud and AI
- Double down on skill development, particularly in cloud and AI.
- Seek training opportunities to adapt your existing skills to the changing tech landscape. Transcript: Brian Gracely And that’s, that’s just as important as the volume or the, you know, the dollar number budget. So take all those things into consideration. And we’ve talked about this a lot on the show. If you’ve ever listened to the podcast a lot, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, growing technical skills, about increasing your knowledge about stuff. But I think especially where we are in our industry right now, where, you know, cloud is becoming more of a stabilized type of technology. AI is becoming this new, innovative, you know, where it could go type of technology that we’re not exactly sure could go in a lot of different directions. This is a time in which you really almost want to go back and double down and rethink like what kind of skills do I need to work on or do I want to work on that are going to help you, right? That are either going to help the business and hopefully put you in a very good light. They’re going to help you be able to get promoted into some bigger role if that’s what you’re looking for. If there’s an opportunity for you to take existing skills you have and adapt them, adjust them, move, shift them left or right, you know, to this newer paradigm that’s out there, whether It’s in AI or security or, you know, building applications or, you know, business modeling, whatever it might be, now is a great time to start thinking about how am I going to go about Doing that? (Time 0:13:50)
Aligning Priorities
- Understand company, group, and personal priorities.
- Align your work with higher-level priorities for better visibility and career growth. Transcript: Brian Gracely So this is very much something that you want to be thinking about what new skills, and again, they don’t all have to be technical skills they can be business related skills they can be You know human interaction skills you know how well do you present how well do you network how well do you uh you know work on something else right um but but think about that and make that A a priority for yourself okay uh the next thing i had on my list is actually prioritization um you know i said you know the first couple things you want to make priorities, do you understand, Are you making your health better? Are you making that a priority? Are you making your skills a priority? Do you understand budgets? Because that’s the prioritization of money. But I think from a bigger perspective, the fourth thing on that list is prioritization. And this is really, do you understand the priorities at a couple of different levels? Do you understand the priorities of your entire business, right? So if you had a chance to sit for 10 minutes with your CEO or, you know, sort of the executive staff of the leadership team, and you said, hey, what are our priorities for our business? And you wanted them to narrow them down to, hey, like, what are the three or four most important things, right? Obviously, we’re going to work on dozens of things, but what are the most important things that are important to you at a full company level? You want to understand those things. And not every business is going to be the exact same thing. You would think every business’s priorities would be grow revenue as much as possible, or increase customer count, or deliver great products, or whatever those things. But they’re going to vary depending on the business, right? In some cases, the priority for the year is to get their financial house in order, right? Like maybe some situations have come up in which, you know, they struggled for a couple of years or a couple of quarters or whatever, and they have to do some financial management, right? So cost cutting or, you know, just being more active about certain things. In some cases, the priority is going to be innovation in some cases. So in a lot of cases, it’s going to boil down to, you know, can we increase revenues? Can we reduce cost? Can we reduce risk? But you want to kind of have a sense of like, what does the leadership team think is important? And again, it’s typically your companies are going to communicate this to you, but make sure you have an understanding of it. Make sure you ask questions about it. You may not necessarily have a chance to ask a question to the CEO directly or the CIO or whoever it is, but as high up in the organization as you can, make sure you have understanding of What’s important to those people. Right? The next level is you understand what are the priorities for your group, right? And the thing you’re looking for here is really kind of two things. What does your manager or your leadership layout as important? You know, what do they think is the most important? And then the second thing, and this is as important or more important, is can you draw a direct line between what they think at the group level is important and what are the most important Things at the top level, right? And if you feel like you’ve got a big mismatch, maybe not a small mismatch, you might say, well, you know, when I listen to our CEO, we work in some group making, doing something, you know, Maybe, for example, let’s say you work in customer support, right? I’m just using that as an example. You know, they might not say that customer support is the most important thing for the company, right? But they might say that, you know, brand affinity, you know, making people want to work with the company or increasing revenues or whatever. And that’s where you sort of go, okay, well, you know, what would be the things that would increase our revenues or drive, you know, greater customer loyalty? Well, delivering great customer service is probably going to be part of that, right? So you want to at least be able to make a connection between what you work on, even if it’s not explicitly called out and what that’s going to be, right? And if you don’t, that’s when you, you know, you should sort of ask some questions of like, hey, you know, are we working on stuff that is going to roll up to that big thing, right? And then finally, you want to think about your, you know, at a personal level, what are your priorities? How are you going to prioritize the day-to stuff that you’re working on with the things that are going to be most important to your boss or going to be most important to your boss’s boss, Right? And you want to make sure, and this is, you know, this is always sort of an interesting sort of challenge. It’s a time balance sort of challenge of you want to make sure that you’re working on something that is both helpful to the business, um, is something that is going to make your boss and Your team look good as well as something that, you know, you, you can feel proud about, but, but at least as importantly is something that your boss could go to his peers and say, look at What Sam or Mary or, or somebody did, right. And, and how it’s helpful, right. This, that’s how, you know, that visibility, that awareness, that sort of interconnectedness are the things that are to help you get like promoted and, uh, you know, and raises and All that kind of stuff. So you want to really want to think about that, that prioritization and that alignment of prioritization, company level, group level, individual level. (Time 0:15:38)
Networking for Impact
- Network with influential people early in the year.
- Offer solutions and ideas to help them achieve their often-ambitious goals. Transcript: Brian Gracely Okay. Next thing on the list is networking, right? So this is, this is a really simple thing. It’s a difficult thing always to sort of clarify and so forth, but it’s really important at the beginning of the year is once you start to get a sense of what are the priorities for the company, What are the budgets for the company, those types of things, what are the goals for the company, is to make sure you start networking with the people that look like they’re going to have The biggest impact on those things. Right. And the reality is, you know, every company, you know, every job has a level of importance to it. But there are jobs that are going to be more important. They’re going to have greater visibility. They’re going to have greater stress and complexity to them. And you want to figure out how do I get aligned to those? How do I have awareness with those people? How do I how do I network with them just to see like maybe there’s opportunities for you to learn from them, for you to contribute to what they’re working on, even if they’re not necessarily Your group. Maybe it’s a side project that you can work on. Maybe you have some skill sets that they could benefit from that they don’t necessarily know about, right? And so this is a great time at the beginning of the year because not only is it good for you to have visibility, but to be quite honest with you, everybody at the beginning of the year, when They start to get their goals for the year, the goals seem in 99.9% of the cases that I’ve seen in companies that I’ve worked for, they’re going to be bigger than the year before. And in many cases, people are going to look at them and they’re going to go, how in the world am I going to reach that goal? How am I going to attain that goal? They want us to do 100% growth. They want us to do 40% growth. They want us to do 50% more than last year, but they’re going to cut our budget by a third from last year. How are we going to do these things? And so there’s a lot of people who, without specifically calling out and saying it, are pretty nervous about how they’re going to meet what the year looked like. They’re nervous about, am I going to do this? How am I going to support my team? How am I going to deliver what the business wants? How am I going to make sure that I meet my goals so that I make my salary and make my bonus and take care of my family and all those sort of things? So there’s, you know, especially that first quarter, there’s a lot of uneasiness of people, even if your business is doing fantastically well, right? Whether your business is doing great or whether it’s doing, it’s struggling or somewhere in between that first quarter in particular is one in which everybody is looking for ideas, Right? They don’t want complaints. They want, they don’t want, they don’t want you to, you know, give them a bunch of, you know, what ifs they’re looking for ideas and they’re looking for people that if you come to them with An idea, potentially, uh, you know, have a plan for executing. And so it’s a great opportunity, you know, again, once you understand sort of priorities and budgets and where you align to start doing some networking and say, hey, you know, could I be involved and try and make things better or try and, you know, help reduce some stress on some people. (Time 0:20:31)
Justification Scrutiny
- Innovative projects often face less scrutiny due to their uncertain nature.
- Established areas receive more scrutiny regarding ROI and cost justification. Transcript: Brian Gracely Okay. Last two things I have on my list, you know, we’ll try and make this quick. First is just what I call justifications. And so this is where you need to start asking yourselves, okay, so you understand the priorities of the company, you understand the budgets, you’re working with the people that are Going to kind of, you know, get things in line. Where are you going to see the most justifications needed? Right. And what I mean by that is there are going to be parts of your business in which there’s a lot of big ideas, a lot of excitement. Maybe this is AI in your business as an example that the people are like, we need to go generally in that direction. But there’s a lot of unknowns and there’s a lot of uncertainty, but there’s also a lot of promise to it. And again, it doesn’t necessarily have to be AI. It could be whatever the most interesting thing is that you’re working on in your business or what seems like the next big step your company might make or a new step they’re going to make. Those types of things don’t always get massively scrutinized because, and I don’t mean by like not scrutinized, but like there’s a lot of leeway given to some of those things because There’s so much unknown. You don’t necessarily know what success is going to look like. You don’t know how long success is going to take. You tend to underestimate how long it might take or how many mistakes you might make. You tend to underestimate how much things are going to cost in some cases, especially if you don’t have a set of mistakes that you’ve already made before to sort of baseline things off Of. Or if the industry is still sort of new in doing this, you can’t really, you know, look to other companies or analyst reports or anything. Those types of things get less scrutiny because again, the upside is perceived to be more important to get right and to do it quickly than to sort of be focused on ROI immediately. Now, the flip side of that is the things that are more stable in your business, the things that have been around for a while, the things that are more well-known are going to be things that Are going to get more scrutiny. Right? How can we get more out of the dollars that we’re spending on these things? What, you know, what do our cloud costs look like? For example, are we really, you know, cloud has become pretty stable. It’s become pretty, pretty mainstream. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s part of the day-to way that you operate, whether it’s, you know, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever it might be. You know, what, you know, that those are areas that will probably be thought of as less innovative. They’re probably going to get more scrutiny, right? The next project that comes along, the next ask for funding, the next ask for headcount, you’re probably going to see, you know, more requirements for sort of ROI, what’s going on is Not necessarily a need for greater scrutiny of any individual project. But what you’re doing is if you think about like squeezing a balloon, if you squeeze the balloon somewhere, the air sort of goes out in the middle and then it kind of pushes out to one side Or the other, both sides, if you squeeze it in the middle. And that’s really kind of what’s going on is you typically have a finite amount of budgeting or a finite amount of time or a finite amount of people. And so for everywhere that you’re going to have areas of less scrutiny, new innovation, new investment, new ideas, whatever, you’re going to have a squeezing of the balloon and other Things. And so this is where you sort of really want to understand, am I working in an area that’s going to be under scrutiny? Am I working in an area that is going to be under, you know, kind of pressure scrutiny in terms of, you know, hey, do this faster, do it better, keep up with the competition, create differentiation? Or am I in an area that’s going to be getting more like cost justification, ROI justification, accountability justification, scrutiny. (Time 0:23:25)
Understanding the Industry
- Understand your industry’s dynamics, trends, and potential changes.
- Identify opportunities and solutions by analyzing industry inefficiencies. Transcript: Brian Gracely Okay. Last thing I had on my list is sort of a bigger picture thing. I have it listed as understanding the game. And what I mean by that is this is really where you want to be thinking about your industry, your company, and your industry, and maybe adjacent industries. But are you going into 2025 and the bigger picture of what you do as a company, is that kind of repeating what’s been going on for the last couple of years? Are you going through a period of change, right? So how is technology or the economy going to impact your business or impacting your industry? And how can you start to think about, you know, what will, you know, two or three steps from now look like, right? So if you were in the media business, for example, media business has gone through tremendous amounts of change over the last decade plus. And it looks like they’re going to continue to go through change as they try and figure out what people like, what sort of media they like to consume content in, how long content should Be, what regulations might be coming along. Maybe you’re working in the automotive industry and you’re looking at, okay, we’ve got new regulations potentially coming along with new political parties in power. You’re looking at the competitive dynamic of what do you sell primarily in the United States? Do you sell in Europe? Are the things happening in Europe? What trends are happening? And you could pick any industry you want to look at, but this is an important time to sort of, you know, reflect on, ask your colleagues, ask your management, kind of how does the game work For your industry? And especially if you’re younger and you’re trying to understand like, hey, I’m doing this job, but like really how does this fit into the bigger picture of things? This is a great opportunity to read the industry magazines, to read magazines, newsletters, sub stacks, you know, attend events, attend meetups. But this is a great time to start really thinking about if you don’t understand it or you haven’t thought about kind of the bigger picture of your industry to really kind of try and understand The game. Because I think you’ll find that the more you understand it, the more you start to think about, okay, where are their efficiencies? Where are their inefficiencies? Where could this change really unlock some new opportunity? Where could some change that’s coming along really change stuff that could be impactful to your business positively or negatively? And the people who are able to think that way and then articulate the what’s next or the, you know, both the possibilities, but also solutions, potential solutions are the people that, You know, again, sort of rise above just being great technicians or being great at any one skill and get looked at to help take the company to next levels. (Time 0:27:21)